If you are running an online business and you are looking to take it up a notch, you may want to consider getting yourself a website designer to make your website stand out even more. Of course, standing out does not mean crazy flashy, but more professional looking and easier to navigate. Having this sort of appeal and user-friendliness will surely give your website a distinct and substantial edge over your competition.

When you know that you do not have the skill to design your website yourself, hiring a professional web designer may be the right thing to do. This is not only a smart investment on your part, but it may also be that added boost to make your website afloat. If you have ever visited boring websites and did not stay long enough to explore it, then that is what visitors to your website will likely do if they find a boring website. Having the right mix of pleasant, eye-catching, and user friendliness on a website is important.

Website Designer

If you plan on getting a web designer for your site, there are some things you might want to take into consideration. The first will be to hire someone that is from your locality or city area. While it may be tempting to hire professionals from off shore, there are many disadvantages to this, especially on the matter of explicitly explaining some of the finer details that you want. This is why if there is a good website designer from within your area, then they will be the ideal ones to hire. If you live in the province of Alberta, you will find that there are many talented Calgary website designers out there. Calgary web design companies are highly skilled in designing appropriate websites for the type of niche or business that you have.

Another thing to consider when hiring a web designer will be to check their portfolio of past web design projects. This will allow you to judge if they have the necessary skill to create the vision that you have for your website. The website design Calgary web designers have is very brilliant and elegantly designed. If you want to be flashy, they can accommodate your request while still keeping that professional look of your website. This is why many businesses from Alberta trust the design skills of Calgary web design companies because they really know what they are doing when it comes to web design.

We all know that most of every business needs an online presence. We know this for a fact as we too normally visit their online site first before we even go their store’s physical location. This is why if you have a business, especially these days where most people are often connected online, it cannot be emphasized enough how much you need to have a website for your business.

Opening a website is actually very easy. As long as you have a credit card, you can enroll your domain and hosting from any popular domain and hosting services. The problem now is if you do not know how to manage or tweak your website. It is crucial that your website contains the necessary amount of information, has some weekly type of news update, is very pleasant to the eye, is user-friendly, and has the necessary plugins in case you also plan on selling your products online. If this is somewhat difficult for you or will take you some time to learn – something which you do not really have the time for. If this is the case, then you need to get yourself a web designer; one that will initially make all the necessary design and I.T. features your website needs.

Web Designer

Getting a web designer may not be as easy as you think. Those who really think they are good may charge significantly. Those who are not as good may charge less but you may not end up being satisfied with the overall results. This is why getting the right web designer may pose as a bit of a challenge. However, there is one simple way of getting just the right web designer for your site and that is by examining their portfolio of past projects. This will help you decide if they have what it takes to create the website you want.

Calgary web design and Calgary SEO is an online firm that is based in Alberta, Canada. They specialize in designing different types of websites depending on the needs of their clients. They have been through the business of designing websites for many years and they have the necessary experience to boot. Whether you are in need of website design or SEO services, Calgary website design and Calgary SEO services can help you. You will be amazed just how professional they are in relation to this type of work and how they are very much capable of providing you the results you need for the services that you hire them for.

Corporations need a training plan for employees’ training and skills development. It’s a detailed guide of instruction that will be used during training seminars. Organizations that are very specific on the trainings are giving Disc Test to identify what are the aspects needed to be improved. Results of disc test is then compiled in a disc profile.

It depends on the detailed planning and delivery. These steps will show how to plan a successful training and development.

Determine the purpose of your training – Trainings are made to educate and prepare employees in their undertaking inside the company. Outlining the skills, information and certifications are essential for a better result. Product knowledge, mastery of software applications and learning the policies and procedures should always come first.

Identify the audience of the training – Disc personality assessment test results will give you an overview of who needs the training the most. It can be geared to a certain group of people in a department or to individuals who needs improvement on accomplishing daily tasks. Corporations usually give trainings and skills development to newly hired employees for basic orientation on their day-to-day job.

It’s important to know the budget – You can’t have a rough estimate without identifying the resources. It’s important to select the videos, software and workbooks to be used. Calculating the costs include rental and compensation for the trainer. Identifying these will help you determine how much money do you need.

Select the best trainer – Examining the qualifications of the trainer important. You can hire experts outside or within the organization. But you must see to it that they are qualified for the job. Experienced trainer usually out stand every employee in the room just by literally standing there. Putting an inexperienced individual to train them is not a good idea.

Training content is the center of all preparations – Topic outline is crucial for every training anywhere in the world. You need to break down the topics to create lesson titles. If it’s about improving the knowledge on productivity software; file creation, formatting, saving files can become it’s subtopic. Add some assessment plans at the end of every training, it can be group discussion, or group activities. It will also enhance employees’ interpersonal skills.

It’s important to plan everything before doing. Disc test is the best way to start a plan. Knowing the characteristics of every employees and what they need to improve is essential in every training plan.

Ok well maybe they don’t really know it yet but I’m sure there will be a day when designers start to sing the praises of Windows 8 for helping to make creating amazing computing experiences easy to create.

It’s taken me awhile but I think I have started to fully drink the Kool-Aid. I’m still addicted to my XAML workflow (not yet singing the praises of HTML based Windows 8 apps, but I wont rule it out.)

I’m enthused enough I’m going to start blogging again. Mostly because I have been discovering lots of great new APIs that are really fun to use but I need to journal my experience somewhere.

So with my first Windows 8 post I will start off with a reference to a really useful doc that was posted recently… The Performance Tips for Windows Metro XAML apps document should be something we all get our heads around. Performance is much more important this time around as we are supporting much more hardware constrained form factors like windows tablet devices.

And oh yeah if you are designer (this is a designer blog by the way) then you should have already been reading all the UX docs that Microsoft has been posting here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/windows/apps/hh779072

It’s good stuff! The “Category Guidance” docs look new… http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh868274 I’ll be reading through these this weekend.

Visual Design – this is primarily graphical design… Choosing the right colors and proper use of layout, typography, and iconography

Interaction Design – this is primarily the use of motion and interactivity applied at discreet moments in an experience.

Information Architecture Design – this is the thoughtful implementation of a user experience holistically. It’s the culmination of multiple small interactions pulled together into an experience that is complimentary with each individual user experience.

Usability – this is the study of what works and what doesn’t work. It’s where the psychology of the user shines through and effects decision making based on analytics of human behavior.

Knowledge of Trends and Fads – some things you choose to do because its what is cool at the moment and the only way to be relevant.

Creative / Aesthetic Design – I still think this is separate from visual design because creativity isn’t necessarily visual. It takes all these aspects together to create an innovative pleasing experience.

A good flow for good user experience design is:

Step 1: A user research gathers information about a problem that needs to be solved.

Step 2: An information architect creates a good flow through the experience based on prior knowledge of good information design.

Step 3: An interaction designer brainstorms with the IA and proposes and prototypes individual discreet experiences that fit into the information design.

Step 5: Usability testing is employed to verify decisions and based on findings changes are made to the aspects of design that show any weaknesses.

I think as integrators it means we have to be good at all of these steps. And our big value add is that we have a unique perspective of the world because we can think of ways to creatively leverage the platform functionality. The platform is our Legos that we understand better than most IAs and designers.

Granted, this is a simplification of a very complex process. We are constantly exploring new processes and methodologies for making a team of different disciplines effective.

Please comment on this post if you are passionate about this subject and feel like there are any missing disciplines and tasks that are elemental in good user experience design. Im sure I missed tons.

Got an email this morning from one of our talented designers who has a ton of Flash/Flex experience and is interested in joining our “UX Integration” team. He wanted to know what was the most important stuff to be learning.

A bit of background, at IdentityMine we have 4 major roles contributor roles in the app development process. Information Architects, Designers, Integrators, and Developers.

The UX integrator is the guy who sits between the Developer and Designer and can talk both languages ( design “geek” and developer “nerd” ). Unfortunately as of late this has been called the “Devigner” or “Deseloper”. Both don’t really work for me on my business card and since I lost the arm wrestle to get my title to be “User Experience Ninja”, the title User Experience Integration Developer or User Experience Integration Designer is what stuck.

Along the axis of the skills spectrum from Creative Designer > Technical Designer > Creative Developer > Technical Developer, the Integration Designer is the Technical Designer and the Integration Developer is the Creative Developer.

A UX Integration Designer typical comes from a design background and knows some code (enough to be really dangerous). These cats are usually the best candidates for facilitating workflows in a Designer to Developer Direction. Meaning they can take design assets from the standards in the industry and convert those to XAML or functioning Expression Blend projects.

A UX Integration Developer is the dude (or dudette) who usually has a Compute Science background but has a strong empathy for users and a passion for good user experiences. (Coincidentally this is pretty much the criteria for working at IdentityMine… Love your software! ) This person excels in the Developer to Designer communication. In other words this is the guy who knows how to take Dev created UI and make it beautiful.

On the UX Integration team each role strives to get better at what they are good at and to aim for the other side of the spectrum. An Integration Developer should want to be a better Integration Designer and should be learning those tasks. And vice versa.

Ok enough already… So what did I tell the designer who wanted to know what to learn to become an Integrator?

1.) Start to gain a holistic understanding of the platforms… Know the feature set and be ready to see where the dots connect when you are looking at solutions.. (Designers are typically connecting the dots without this context and it’s a huge shortcoming). Try to discover every control in both Silverlight and WPF that you have never used before… They are all there for a reason because some customer wanted them… usually we end up working with those customers at some point and knowing about these controls is an ace up your sleeve. Knowing about Flow Documents and Annotations might not be something you use today… But if you know it tomorrow you are ready.

2.) Once you know of all the controls in the platform the next step is learn to “style” them. This means learning to do simple styling as well as deep “templating” where you completely reconstruct the visuals. Its really important to get your head around the concept of “lookless controls” it’s the magic of WPF/Silverlight and basically means that a control has functionality but not visuals… so that any visuals can be mapped to that functionality later on. The goal of learning to style the controls is to get you to a point where you can see a control and confidently say I can style that one… For example scrollviewer is complicated… it usually takes a day to learn how to style it the first time… The next time… about an hour.

3.) Start exploring different workflows from designers and IAs and Devs… This means to be ready to accept a handoff from these folks in a myriad of different ways… The key is to learn to be flexible. Everybody works in different ways and I’ve found more success in just accepting people’s hand off as is and providing key tips to those people rather than getting frustrated and expecting those assets to come “just the way you like them”.

4.) Learn to prototype fast… A key to our position is our ability to communicate interactive ideas really fast… These are the ideas that don’t communicate well on paper or in static mediums… As well 25 cent usability is our secret sauce. If you can test something out really quickly against real people and against “real” data you will be able to make alterations to the user experience on the fly that correct mistakes that are made at the envisioning stage.

5.) Learn from the other guys There is so much great thinking happening in the Adobe/Apple camps that it would be a tragedy to unplug from those worlds. Without being cliché lets do what they do and learn from their mistakes… It’s incredibly valuable to not reinvent the world.

6.) Of course learn your tools and learn the syntax.
Tools – Learn Blend… Learn it like a hammer… You don’t build a house with only a hammer… But you can’t build a house without one. The point behind tools is to be able to do things you couldn’t do before, and do things you could do before faster. Don’t expect your tool to be a silver bullet or holy grail. Once you accept that you will realize how amazing Blend is… warts and all. I crash Blend all the time and it never bugs me… Crashes usually make designers write Blend off as a tool. Don’t go there.Code - (as in C#) is probably not as important as learning markup (XAML) is. But I still stand firm that learning code and XAML is akin to Michelangelo learning the technologies behind paint and marble… Had he not figured these things out he would not have had a lasting impact.

7.) Try to understand the concepts of different patterns like MVVM
This will give you a greater understanding of why apps are architected the way they are from the development side and give you some expectations.

8.) Learn to make decisions and measure success by asking yourself if you or your audience will “Love their software”?If the answer is no start over again or keep iterating. Look for holes and incompleteness or hard edges in the experience. Try to soften the hard edges and fill in the holes. Learn how to simplify things by being more explicit or via reduction. This is the true value add of the integration role. (It’s also the hardest to define and learn)

I have been so busy I wasn’t able to contribute to the flood of blogs and tweets about Mix this year. Ironically I was there and I did tweet like crazy from the keynotes and the sessions.

It was a great year for Mix… For me it was the magic of the “3’s” year for Microsoft. The rule of thumb usual is if Microsoft sticks it out in any particular segment they will get it right by the 3rd time… And if the betas and previews are any indication of it.. Blend 3 and Silverlight 3 are shaping up to be the pivotal versions for the tool and the platform.

I’ve never seen more people excited about “new” Silverlight features that have been part of the WPF platform for years. Merged Resource Dictionaries, Element Binding, Offline support yadda yadda. Dont get me wrong I am super jazzed about these features coming down to Silverlight and am all the more excited to be doing Silverlight development because there is becoming less and less of a distinction between the skill sets.

If I could point at one thing that I am most excited about seeing at Mix this year was behaviors in Expression Blend. Peter Blois did a presentation that had me all but standing up and cheering Arsenio Hall style WhooWhoo WHooo! Check out his talk here: